What we knew: Acer and Samsung were planning laptops running Chrome OS this summer. What we didn’t know: anything about those laptops. That’s now changed, with word of an Acer netbook tentatively dubbed the ZGB. It has a 1366x768 display, HDMI out and an engine room staffed by Intel’s Atom processor. A second Acer, the Seaboard, is said to have those quarters populated by Nvidia’s Tegra 2 and have a touchscreen. Will it be a convertible tablet of the same ilk as Asus’ Eee Pad Transformer?

Over in the Samsung camp, word has snuck out of the Alex, a 10in (1280x800) netbook with a 1.5GHz dual-core Atom at its heart and 2GB of RAM.

Google’s already confirmed that all Chrome OS laptops will have SIM slots to ready them for on-the-go data over 3G and you should also expect supporting Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless connectivity. The Big G’s I/O event is heading our way on Tuesday the 10th of May. We’ll probably see a couple of partner announcements there. Will we see Sony piping up? Watch this space.